The Fate Of The Turkey

Thanksgiving is done so I thought it would be nice for my annual turkey report.  Since turkey is the standard Thanksgiving meat and the big turkey eating season is from Thanksgiving to Christmas it might be interesting to see how that turkey on the dinner table has changed through the years. But first, an oddity about the Thanksgiving holiday that few if any ever noticed. That is, why is there no (ok, maybe there might be a few bad ones no one has heard) Thanksgiving music? There's none. not a single Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer equivalent. Halloween has songs, Christmas does, Easter, even St. Patrick's Day. I think the turkeys would appreciate a song or two about their fate as they are slaughtered for the dinner table.

Anyway, turkeys in the United States have fallen on hard times recently.  Many commercially raised turkeys on industrial farms cannot even mate properly, leaving the turkey industry almost completely dependent on artificial insemination.  Consumer demand and technological innovation have made sex obsolete for the dinner table turkey. I guess there aren't any cruise bars for turkey's either.

Turkeys with large breast and thigh muscles are prized by farmers because they're the most valuable parts of the bird at sale. So turkeys that naturally had those traits were selected to breed by farmers, increasing their size through generations. Technological advances in artificial insemination before W.W. II allowed for turkey semen to be distributed. This and the almighty steroid have made for giant turkeys today.

The European settlers  in North America would have seen the turkey as a common North American bird. Like wild turkeys today, the wild turkey was dark in color, sporting barred white feathers with a green and bronze iridescent sheen. But the color of turkeys have changed. The old natural dark colored pin feathers is out and the more desirable looking clean pink skin is in.

The wild turkey of the easily days of America were sleek and quick, and could fly short distances when they needed to. But as they became breed birds that changed.  In 1960 the average wild turkey matured in 36 weeks and weighed 15 pounds. Today's commercially bred turkey takes 18 weeks to mature and weighs on average at 31 pounds. Their breasts are now so big they can no longer fly. Wow! Turkey on steroids.

Having said all of that, maybe the perfect Thanksgiving song would be one to document the sad decline of the once glorious bird into a sex deprived, overly breast laden, steroid freak. Gobble, gobble to that.